When and how did you first start making sunglasses?
I’ve been making sunglasses for 7 years. Through a friend, I started doing marketing for a fashion eyewear manufacturer and worked my way into design and product development. We really wanted to make quality sunglasses for our friends and people into similar lifestyles- rock n’ roll, tatoo culture, hot rods and skateboarding.
What is your most indispensable tool for making sunglasses?
Probably all of our fit models. You can design what you think is the perfect sunglass but if it looks horrible on your friends its probably going to look horrible on people that pay good money for the glasses. My caliper which measures millimeters and is pretty mandatory as well.

“Tres Noir” means “Very Black”–how did you come up with this name for your brand?
The name means Very Black or 3 Black depending on what day of the week it is and if we’ve been drinking. My brother Joe took the word Noir from film noir, and the Tres- just sounded good and either description “Very” or “3″ works. “Noir” also describes how we work, since only have the lights in our building turn on.
Most of your products are named after songs. How do you choose the titles, and how do they fit with each style?
This is one of the most difficult parts of the sunglass process. We normally get a group together put on some long white wigs and have a British parliament like discussion. When a name is chosen our marketing guy, Tony F. drives his 61 Cadillac through the streets of Los Angeles announcing the name.

Online now is your 2007 collection. How many previous collections are there?
We launched our first collection in Spring 2006. The Spring 2008 collection is our 4th release. All our glasses are made in small quantities, so we constantly add and retire colors and styles.

The Aaron Bell koi print is Artist Series 1. Are there more of the Artist Series in the works?
Yeah, we are planning on featuring 1-2 of the top tattoo and rock n’roll artists each year. We are finalizing next years glass now, and it should be available to the public in September.

Do you have any plans to expand Tres Noir to include other accessories?
No- Tres Noir has been a sunglass company from day one and optics is what we are good at . We’d rather put our energy in making a better sunglass instead of the 15th version of a modified Chuck Taylor or Vans slip-on.

They should be in stores soon. We have been lucky enough to have some top artists including The Creep, Damian Fulton, and japanese artist- Grimb give us some designs. You can check for updates at www.tresnoir.com, www.tresnoir.de or myspace- keyword tresnoir or tresnoireurope.